by Jeff Hull
“Something tells me you broke a lot more hearts than the other way around.”
Jenny looked out the window behind them at the night, away for a moment, then back at him. “It’s funny how people have ideas about you. It’s mostly their own story they put on you. I didn’t break a lot of hearts. I tell you what I did. When there was a boy I was interested in, I moved deep into like really quickly so that, should love come along, I’d be right there ready for it.”
“A strategy. See, most people don’t have one of those for love.”
“Didn’t matter that much. Love didn’t really come along so often.”
“It came along some. You got married.”
“Well, that was more I let him chase me until I caught him.”
Tom let that sink in, liked the way she could admit it so clearly. He had an idea of who he thought she was and she was going to complicate it. The first wine bottle was gone so he opened a second.
“I was dumb, like all of us,” Jenny said. “Young girls spend their time picking at the bones of why they aren’t getting what they need. When you spend so much time thinking about how things should be, it’s hard to see how they really are. I wanted the quarterback, even if he wasn’t worth having. I wanted him because everybody else wanted him, and if I could get him then I’d know that was about as good as I could do. I was a lot like Josie Frehse, chasing after Matt Brunner.”
“I’m not sure how much chasing she does,” Tom said.
“It’s all over them, clear as Romeo and Juliet. She’s such a lovely girl. So much potential. She’s smart, pretty, athletic, great people skills. But she’s locked into that boy, and he’s going to drag her down.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. Here Jenny was putting her own story on someone else, maybe. “Matt could get out of his own way, he’d be all right. If he survives high school, goes somewhere where he hasn’t been king banana his whole life, gets kicked around a bit. He’s a competitor. He knows how to work. He’s not dumb. He’s just …”
“Dumont,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But that Josie, I think she’s going on. She’ll get a basketball ride somewhere—she’s one of the best point guards I’ve ever seen.”
“If she can get away from Matt.”
“I think … I don’t want to say break free, because that implies there’s something bad here that holds her back. But I think she’ll go on. I think she’ll outgrow him, and here, and make a go somewhere else in the world.”
“I hope so,” Jenny said.
Tom thought he knew why she seemed so invested in Josie Frehse. The same reason he was. The same reason he wanted her brother Jared to leave Dumont, the same reason he wanted Alex Martin and eventually Waylon Edwards and even Matt Brunner, even Mikie LaValle to leave, to see a bigger sense of their place in the world.
Tom had left his little Montana town and, while it was true he had come back to life on the plains, he had done it deliberately. He had gone out and seen what the rest of it had to offer. He had gone to college. He had smoked pot with his hippie wide receiver and become friends with the black linebacker from Texas who beat him out for the starting job. He had rented his own apartment, fallen in love, had his heart broken, stayed up all night just talking to a woman he never kissed, drove twelve hours round-trip to go fishing because he could, paid bills, created choices about jobs.
He’d lived for eighteen months in Boise, gone to work every day in a radon testing business. He’d led a bunch of life on purpose. And he’d come back to the prairies. On purpose. You return to places to learn why you left them. He poured some more wine.
“How’d that all end up? You and that quarterback.”
Jenny’s face took a different cast, now that they were talking about her again. Her eyes went hard, looking inward. “I have the gift of pouring trust into people who don’t deserve it. And then after a while I just started to feel like a tiny approximation of myself.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She brushed that off with a flip of her hand. “What about you? Weren’t you basically Matt Brunner?”
“Oh, well … no. I can see how you’d think that, but no.”
Now Tom took a moment to see around him. Scout lay on the floor, chin on the floorboards, resigned to not being the center of attention. Jenny was on the couch beside him, her long legs up on his coffee table, feet in socks. Her black slacks looked like someone had grated a dog on them. She leaned back in the couch but angled toward him. Her face tilted his way.
Her arm, the one not holding her wine glass, lay beside his thigh. Because he had slouched a bit, he tilted toward her. It hadn’t happened at any one time, just a function of leaning to pour wine—they were deep into the second bottle by now.
“What were you like?” she asked.
Tom moved again, sinking into the couch, but rolling a shoulder closer to her.
“It’s funny. So much happened since then. I sometimes get my own experience mixed up with movies I like.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“It’s true,” Tom said. “I think maybe it’s shock. Trauma. I just spent so much time trying not to think about certain things so that I could live a daily life that eventually my memory of those things is completely unreliable. I don’t remember much about being a kid. I wasn’t happy, I know that. I was good at football and that brought certain notice, but it also brought a lot of attention and expectation and, to be honest, I liked to read books. I liked to go off in the hills by myself and hunt and fish. I was a loner. I didn’t really have a high school girlfriend. I didn’t understand how you could, I think.”
“It came along some,” she said, smiling. “You got married.”
“It came along for me in college. That’s where I learned to be who I was. I had a college girlfriend. I really liked her. I still really admire her. She taught me a lot.”
“The ways of the world?” Jenny said. She was teasing, but prying, too.
“I guess, but not just that. She was a real free spirit. She wanted to know a lot of things about life and she went about finding out. She taught me a lot about how to let myself be me.”
“Ah, back when lovin’ was easy,” she said, and he knew she was poking him. “By the time I got to college, free spirits were when someone else was buying at the bar. I was already pretty much roped to what I ended up with.”
“Funny how it works.”
“What happened to your marriage?” He’d known it would come. Almost as soon as they’d quit laughing about the house smell, he’d wanted her to ask, felt like he’d be able to tell her. And to make it even bigger, Jenny let her hand drop on top of one of his and squeezed.
“I don’t think,” Tom said, because he’d been wanting to say this to someone for a long, long time, “that I ever dealt with my divorce. Processed it. And I think we got divorced because I’ve never dealt with, processed, my … the loss of our son.”
She winced to encourage him to go on.
“After we’d had some time to mourn, my wife and I never addressed the ‘us’ part, the part that fell apart after our boy died.”
Sophie said she didn’t blame him for Derek’s death. It had been an accident. He had been driving. He accepted the fault. That was the thing about blame and fault, though. One you take and the other you give to someone else. That give and take was what had silently ripped Sophie from him.
Sophie had been so unreachable, impenetrable, and his aimlessness had not allowed him any purchase against her seamlessness. On the odd occasions he did seem to find a grip, he couldn’t remain focused long enough to find other handholds nearby, to create a locus of attachment to which he might have clung long enough for her to take notice.
He became dreamy, instead, believing his dreaming world had taken on a greater significance than his waking one. He imagined scenarios that were much more interesting than real. And when both of them finally looked up from their preoccupations, they had swirled so far apart from each othe
r, could barely make out each other’s features against the sky. He was mad at her for letting herself get so far away from him, for not calling for help earlier.
But he had done the same. The energy it would take to move back to closeness seemed too wearying when their sense of familiarity with the world had been so stunningly and irrevocably altered. It was easier for each just to let the other go than to deal with their disappointing selves and all it would take to get over coming back. Tom had believed Sophie was the great love of his life, that once-in-a-lifetime person that always has a piece of you, no matter how things turn out on the ground. He had believed he would never love anybody as both profanely and profoundly as he had once loved her.
She had said the same about him. What was between them would always stay between them, and that was the glory and the tragedy. She was gone—and that was the reality. She was not someone he could be with. Jenny Calhoun was right here, in his house on this night. She was so plainly beautiful and not going anywhere.
“I used to spend a lot of time being sad,” Tom said. He turned the hand that Jenny had been holding, turned it over so it was holding hers, and he put his wine glass down to hold her other hand. He didn’t look at her while he talked. He looked to where Scout was stretched on the floor, or to the silent, empty TV screen. “And then that changed, and I spent so much time being anxious. It was like I feared that the sadness could hurt me, like sadness was a reason for fear.
“My wife used to spend a lot of time reading about Buddhism after we lost Derek. My ex-wife. Those Buddhists she started to believe in emphasized present moments. She was always trying to get me to be more involved, be more present. But I was never really being present because I was so busy pretending to be. Back then, for me? There was no such thing as the present. There was only memory and anticipation. Sophie grew so hard around that. It made me feel weak.”
“There’s a difference between being hard and being strong,” Jenny said.
Sure there was, Tom thought, but who had been telling anyone that back then?
There was no pretending that somewhere along the way their thighs hadn’t pressed closer to each other. He felt happy that it was happening this way, that there weren’t fits and starts. That they had been so open and were both being so forward. He looked at her now, and saw what he hoped to see, the yes in her eyes.
“Do you have to be home at any certain time?” he asked.
“The kids are at my sister’s for the night.”
He nodded. No smile. He wasn’t trying to be charming. Didn’t feel like he needed to be. All the want had already been there, for a long time. They just needed to get some honesty out of the way. He felt the way clear.
Jenny said, “We’re going to do this?”
“I sure hope so.”
“One question,” she said. “Just one.”
“Fire.”
“Did you sleep with that lawyer from Great Falls?”
“I did not.”
She nodded, securely. She sat up then and brought her face to his and looked into his eyes and kissed him. One long kiss that started timidly and quickly opened and deepened until they were both breathing deeply through their noses, still kissing. And then she broke it off. Stared into his eyes.
“You think I’m some fragile thing. I’m not.”
She stood up and started walking toward the bedroom as if she’d been there a hundred times before.
* * *
Thursday at practice, Josie had the dropsies and everything she put up clanged off the rim. A pass she wasn’t looking for hit her in the side of the face, stinging and ringing her ears. Her own passes skidded behind her teammates, or sailed beyond their reach. And it hurt. It hurt because the court was where Josie felt so free.
Nobody could touch her here. When another team had a great player who would front her, Josie had always been able to dig in and lose herself to being better than every one on the court. She could so focus on moving her feet, being where she knew the ball was going, seeing open lanes that she rarely had any idea how many points she had scored until someone told her later. The focus took everything away.
It made her know she was good. Tonight was only practice, and there was nobody on the Dumont team who could slow her down—except, apparently, her. Midway through a three-on-three drill, Coach Bury sat her. He didn’t criticize, just whistled, shouted, “Frehse, have a seat. Engstrom, get in there,” and the drill rolled on. Josie sat on the bench and acted like she was watching and fretted over what she would say when Coach asked her what was wrong. My boyfriend kicked the shit out of me.
Was that an answer she could give to an adult? There really wasn’t much practice for her after that. A few shooting drills, through most of which she was preoccupied with hoping Coach Bury wouldn’t question her. In the end, he let her walk into the locker room with just a long look. She had shaken her head. He trusted her. That much she knew.
But she had no answers for him. Nothing he would understand. Nothing she could understand. She could not imagine being one of those women she read about in books and saw in movies, women who let men beat them up, let men dominate their lives. Matt was a loose cannon, sure, but never to her.
Never. When she had gone home the night before, after the church, her mother had still been up, sitting at the kitchen table, searching for pieces to a huge jigsaw puzzle.
“Where have you been?” Judy asked without looking up. “I was going to start looking for you on milk cartons.”
Josie didn’t want to say where she’d been. She had no clever retort. Her mom had looked up slowly.
“I think Matt’s, I don’t know …” Josie had said.
“What’s going on with Matt?” Judy Frehse had asked.
“He got … really angry,” Josie said.
“Angry how?” her mother asked.
“Like, furious. Like, physical.”
Her mother stood up, walked to fridge and half-filled her glass from the filtered pitcher. She turned and leaned against the sink. Josie looked at her, try to read her, to know how much to tell her. But her mother was so … certain. She wore the same clothes always—jeans and button-down shirts, no variation in theme, never a dress unless there was a wedding or a funeral. Her hair, the gray-blonde wings hanging beside her face, was always the same, and had been for all of Josie’s life.
“What happened, Jos?” her mother asked.
“Matt got really mad and … he lost it.”
“Lost it how?”
Josie sobbed, once. Then again and then she was crying. Her mother put the glass down and opened her arms and came forward, “Come here, Jos,” Judy said, and she held Josie close, squeezed her in. “What is going on with you?”
They stayed wrapped together that way for a while, neither of them speaking until Josie stopped crying and could feel how fast her mother breathed, how firmly her mother’s wiry arms wrapped around her. Judy said, “Are you okay, baby?”
“I was really scared,” Josie said. “He hurt me. He threw me on the ground and kicked me.”
Still wrapping her, Judy Frehse said, “Oh good Jesus, baby. Why would he do that?”
“He thinks I’m cheating on him,” Josie said.
Silence from her mother, whose face Josie couldn’t see.
“I’m not, Mom.”
Her mother said nothing, just held her and stroked her hair.
“I’m not cheating on him.”
“He can’t do that to you, baby. He can’t hurt you.”
“I’m not cheating on him, Mom.” Josie was crying slowly now, just tears.
“Such a mess,” her mother said.
“Don’t tell Daddy, okay?”
Josie was crying hard now. Her mom was silent.
“Okay, Mom? Please?”
“Let me tell him what he needs to know, but not right now. I won’t tonight. Okay?”
“Why did he do that, Mom? He’s supposed to love me.”
Her mother was rocking her a little now.
“That boy’s going through so much.”
Josie jerked away, bounded up, leaving her mother holding the shape of where she’d been. “God, Mom. Whose side are you on?”
“I’m on your side, Jos. I am always on your side. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. You kids are so secretive about your lives. Until something bad happens.”
“This isn’t something I did, Mother. This is something someone did to me. Someone who I thought I trusted.”
Judy Frehse quit the pose of a mother whose child has left her embrace, dropped her arms, let her hand rest on the frame of the ladderback chair.
“I just wish I knew more about what was happening before the bad things happen,” she said. “That’s all.”
“God, Mom, this isn’t about you,” Josie snapped. She whirled and ran to her room, her back and ribs flashing with pain.
Later, her mother came into her room and stood in the doorway and said, “I think you’d better not be around Matt until he’s had some time to cool down. You can tell him we said you’re not allowed to see him. And maybe you could think about whatever it is that made him so mad. If there’s anything you can do about that.”
Josie spoke evenly and quietly. “I did not ask to get dragged out of my truck by my hair and kicked in the church parking lot, Mom.”
“The church parking lot?” her mother said, and then clipped her tone. “I … we hear things. Around town. You know? People say things. I don’t believe everything I hear. But I want to hear them from you.”
So you can blame me? Josie thought. But she lay silently until her mother leaned over, brushed her hair from her forehead and kissed it, then left.
And now practice, the place where she could always disappear, was over without offering her any solace and she didn’t want to go home and listen to her mother—didn’t even want to have to look at her mother—and who knows what her mother might have told her father by now. And she was hungry. So she went to Pep’s.
She ordered cheese fries and sat at one of the high tables back from the bar, sipped a 7-Up through a straw and scrolled through her phone while she waited for the food. Everything on Snapchat seemed thoroughly childish at the moment. She’d answered few of the texts she had received throughout the day—dozens from her girlfriends, who knew nothing of what had happened and were caught up in tiny invented dramas. Matt had texted once: I want to see you.